[OS X TeX] OT: Backup software

[Alex Hamann]

Am 10.10.2006 um 12:36 schrieb Bruno Voisin:

> Le 10 oct. 06 à 11:56, Rick Zaccone a écrit :
>
>> Personally, I'm waiting for Time Machine <http:// 
>> www.computerworld.com/action/article.do? 
>> command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003885&pageNumber=1>.  If you  
>> haven't seen the WWDC demo of it, take a look.  It's impressive.
>
> Same here.
>
> For the moment I'm sticking to Apple's Backup: I make a full backup  
> of my home directory to an external hard drive, once a month say  
> (actually it tends to be once every three months, due to lack of  
> time, but that's clearly not often enough), and one incremental  
> backup every day. But a .Mac subscription is required, otherwise  
> you're limited to 100 MB in one go.
>
> I'm very impressed by Gary's backup strategy: if I understood  
> correctly, incremental backups every hour to different hard drives  
> in the day and in the evening, plus a bootable clone of the whole  
> hard drive every day. Unfortunately that doesn't seem possible  
> here: first, it requires several different hard drives, which  
> moneywise isn't possible; and it requires configuring several  
> pieces of software rather precisely, which I'm not sure I can manage.
>
> Another concern is size and time: my home directory is about 20 GB,  
> and making a full backup with Backup takes already about 2 hours,  
> which is why I am not able to do it as often as advisable. And even  
> doing a daily incremental backup takes most of my PowerBook's CPU  
> while the backup is being performed. That's why I'm skeptical about  
> attempting to backup more often. Not even to say cloning the entire  
> hard drive!
>
> Two more things:
>
> - With the MacPro in which you can put several hard drives, I think  
> I've read somewhere it's possible to create a software RAID with  
> these drives. I've no idea how this can be done, or whether it's  
> built-in somewhere in OS X or requires 3rd-party software, but that  
> might also serve as backup. The only problem would be, of course,  
> the fact that all the backups would live within the same machine,  
> so that if something bad happens to that machine (theft, fire,  
> water, ...) then all the backups are lost.
>
> - Last week I just got a MacPro. Given the difference in speed with  
> my venerable PowerBook G4, I will move to the MacPro as my main  
> computer. The only significant problem is email: when all my mail  
> was living on the PowerBook, I could read and send mail from  
> everywhere (home, McDonald's, ...), having all the past  
> correspondence available all the time. Now that I'm reading and  
> sending mail from work on the MacPro during the day, this means I  
> don't have most of the correspondence of the day at home in the  
> evening on the PowerBook: I can't see the Sent messages, stored on  
> the MacPro, and all the messages that were transferred upon arrival  
> to local mailboxes through filtering rules (like moving all OS X  
> TeX messages to a local OS X TeX mailbox) are also stored on the  
> MacPro.
>
> This is certainly a trivial problem, but I haven't yet figured out  
> a satisfactory solution -- other than forgetting about email at  
> home in the evening, which on the other hand turns out quite good  
> for my social life ;-) Given my email directories sum up to about  
> 2.5 GB, I doubt OS X synchronization could deal with it  
> transparently: for sure it would take ages to synchronize mailboxes  
> on two computers every day?
>
> Bruno Voisin

I would recommand you to have a look at Intego Personal Backup. After  
the first backup (which takes quite some time) every other backup  
will only copy new and changed files. If you run it daily the whole  
thing should not take more than 10 -15 minutes.
Secondly, it gives you the option of syncronizing two different macs.  
Although I have not tried this yet, it might take care of your mail  
problem. You can get a free trial version with all features on the  
Intego website and later upgrade it to the full version if desired.  
It seems to be a bit more expensive than similar software (never  
tried SuperDuper) but I am more than happy with it.

Regards,
Alex

>
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